Marriage: if it ain't broke why try to fix it?

What happened when the writer Elizabeth Weil made the – some might say crazy –
decision to try to make some improvements to her already happy marriage?

Elizabeth WeilPhoto: KEVIN KUNISHI

By Elizabeth Weil

7:00AM GMT 10 Dec 2012

I was 39, my husband and I had been married for nine years and had two children when I embarked on what many people considered a crazy, even self-defeating, path: to take our good marriage and try to make it better. Already Dan and I shared so many joys, I believed in him and he in me. We laughed at the same dumb jokes. The magic hadn’t faded of seeing him walk towards me down a city block, smiling and handsome with his bright-blue eyes and the gap between his teeth.

I’m no different from most people I know. A bit ambitious in some areas, but not enough in others. I worked hard at being a good mother, good friend, and good writer, yet I cannot keep my car clean. Still, I planned to be married to Dan, my husband, for many years to come. I know the conventional wisdom is ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it’, but is passivity really better than striving? Why not work harder at being a good wife?

Since our wedding we had been bumbling along with two basic ground rules – no cheating and no dying. We considered their breakages the only trespasses our marriage could not survive. But one night I started wondering why we were being so cavalier. Why weren’t we caring more for our marriage, making it as strong as it could be?

My marriage was utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, to raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away.

I wanted to understand why. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly – some might say obsessively – at skill acquisition. During our marriage he’d taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we fear?

I decided to apply myself to my marriage, to work at improving it now, while it still felt strong. The average couple is unhappily married for six years before presenting at therapy, at which point, according to the book The Science of Clinical Psychology, the marital therapist’s job is ‘like [that of] a GP who is asked to treat a patient who broke his or her leg several months ago and then continued to hobble around on it’. I didn’t want this narrative.

Our children, two girls who are now four and seven, were no longer desperately needy, our careers had stabilised, we had survived renovating our house. I had energy for Dan once again. Still, Dan was not completely enthusiastic. He met my suggestion with the veiled threat of California ranch-hand wisdom: if you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d best be prepared to scare out some snakes.

From the myriad psychology books that stacked up on my desk I learnt that my concept was sound, if a bit unusual. How to start? What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex? Our goal, and how to reach it, was strangely unclear. We all know what marriage is, a legal commitment between two people.

But the idea of a good marriage is ill defined. For guidance I turned to the standard assessments. The Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test instructs spouses, among other things, to rank themselves along the ‘always agree’ to ‘always disagree’ continuum on matters ranging from recreation to in-laws. This struck me as scattershot and beside the point.

Dan and I decided to dive in, trusting that the terms of our better marriage and the yardstick by which to measure those terms would emerge along the way. We began our putative improving with Harville Hendrix’s Oprah-sanctioned self-help bestseller, Getting the Love You Want. I let Dan pick the first exercise. He chose ‘reromanticising’.

Step one: complete this sentence: ‘I feel loved and cared about when you …’ Dan quickly jotted down ‘submit to kissing, clean the kitchen, tell me I look study’.

‘Let’s try for 10,’ I said.‘Ten!’ Dan said, teasing but serious. ‘You can think of 10?’ Step two: recall the romantic stage of your relationship. Complete this sentence: ‘I used to feel loved and cared about when you …’

Dan drew one of those circles with a diagonal line through it on his paper, symbolising, he joked, ‘the null set’. Then he grabbed my list. ‘“Looked giddy to come through the door and see me,”’ Dan read, groaning. ‘Are you kidding me? You don’t even see me when you come through the door. It’s like you’re blind and deaf to everyone but the kids.’

I thought I had avoided becoming one of those mothers who transferred all of her romantic energy from her husband to her children. Apparently, I’d failed. But Dan, in my view, hadn’t mastered the spouse-parent balance either, only his problem was the opposite: at times he ignored the kids. While reromanticising I asked him, testily, ‘Do you really think a 6ft 2in, 14st man who works at home with his wife needs to compete with his small children for their mother’s attention?’ Great. Now we were having a row.

My doubts set in. What if my good marriage was teetering on a precipice and any change would mean a toppling, a crashing down?

Still, one Saturday we attended a marriage-education class. The class sounded perfect for me, being based on the idea that you can learn to be better at marriage. We had enrolled in a 16-hour, two-day course called Mastering the Mysteries of Love. The classes teach students how to have ‘skilled conversations’ – as opposed to the rhetorical jousting matches standard in many relationships and in our house. It is an exercise in forced empathy. One person starts by describing his or her feelings, the other person validates those feelings, perhaps even repeating them verbatim.

Mid-morning Dan and I retreated to a sofa with a template for having a skilled conversation about a ‘small disagreement’. Among our most long-standing arguments was how much energy and money should go into Dan’s cooking. Shortly after our first child, Hannah, was born, Dan and I started having the same conversation every night, ‘Do you want to cook dinner or look after the kid?’ He always picked cook, I always picked kid, and now, seven years later, Dan is an excellent, compulsive and profligate chef.

On a ho-hum weeknight he might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction. But this was only a partial joy. Dan’s cooking enabled him to hide in plain sight, he was at home but busy – for hours every evening. During this time I was left to attend to our hungry, tired and frantic children and to worry about the money he’d spent.

I knew Dan’s cooking, and his obsessions in general, were mechanisms to bind his anxiety. Without an outlet, Dan tended towards depression, and his depression vented as anger. He cooked because he needed to. He was not cooking for me, not for the girls. Yet now, in our marriage class, following the skilled-conversation template, the emotional distance between us on this issue seemed to collapse.

I said, then Dan repeated to me, ‘The chaos is really upsetting, and you’d like to find a way to maintain more peace and calm in our home.’ Then Dan said, and I repeated to him, ‘Food is a truly important part of family. For you it’s health and pleasure bound together, and it lets you express and pursue the life you want to live three times a day.’

That afternoon, as we talked in this stilted, earnest style, I felt a trapdoor crack open in our marriage. In the days and nights that followed our intimacy grew. We had never considered our verbal jousting to be protecting uncomfortable feelings. Clearly it was.

For the next few weeks even our sex was more intimate, more open and trusting. Then I found myself recoiling. I kept experiencing the psychological equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion. I had an innate equal and opposite reaction to our new-found intimacy, to living our lives – as the saccharine marriage-improvement phrase goes – as ‘we’ instead of as ‘me’. Dan has a bigger, flashier personality than I do. I feared, in our intimacy, I might be subsumed. Yes, I loved the emotional security of knowing that if I said, ‘I’m upset,’ Dan would say back, ‘You’re upset.’

But while this was comforting to a point, it also felt unsustainable, even cloying. A few weeks later we decided to try some psychoanalytic couple’s therapy. But I was wary. Why turn over the rocks of one’s history just to see what’s underneath? In marriage therapy this fear makes particular sense, because the therapy carries not only the threat of learning things about yourself that you might prefer not to know, but also the hazard of saying things to your spouse that are better left unsaid, as well as hearing things from your spouse that you might prefer not to hear.

Holly Gordon, our reed-thin psychoanalyst, did not think much of our plan to stick with discussing the good parts of our marriage and leaving the rest unsaid. ‘To get the most out of this we need to talk about some dissatisfaction or problem, something you’re trying to improve,’ she instructed. In lieu of mining our history for newer and harsher truths, Dan and I pursued the lesser offence of making the other sound crazy.

We settled into airing well-rehearsed gripes. The time Dan came to the hospital to visit me and the 4lb, premature Hannah, and all he could talk about was San Francisco building regulations (he’d torn the front stairs off our house and kept rebuilding them and ripping them off again, fearing they were imperfect). The time Dan proposed a trade: he would clean up more if I would French-kiss him spontaneously once a day – I gave up first.

Our second session, the following week, ended with this cutting synopsis: ‘On the one hand,’ Holly said, ‘you find Dan unavailable because he’s not relating to you. But on the other, he feels he can’t reach you, either. He wants you to accept his affection and praise, but those attentions make you feel smothered and that makes him feel alone.’ Two 50-minute sessions and Holly had reduced our pretty good marriage to an unappealing, maybe even unsalvageable, conundrum. Would her vote of little confidence hurt or help?

Since the beginning of this project Dan had been waiting for one thing: sex therapy. I thought Dan and I were doing well for a couple with such young kids. We had sex – regular sex, very regular sex – a few times a week. As part of my project I read Stephen Mitchell’s Can Love Last?The Fate of Romance Over Time and had an honest-to-goodness revelation.

Mitchell explains that romance doesn’t die in marriage due to neglect. He argues that romance dies because we kill it, on purpose, as it becomes increasingly dangerous. The illusion that our spouse is some sort of golden retriever is ‘not a given but a construction’, Mitchell writes. We tell ourselves that our mates, who travel or go to work each day amid a sea of potential lovers, will return home, ever faithful to us, because we cannot bear to think otherwise.

Inspired by Mitchell, I decided to try a thought exercise; to think, while Dan and I were making love, that I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, that he was not predictable in the least. And, somewhat shockingly, within a few minutes – for my husband of 10 years – I started to have some of the same sweaty feelings I’d had in my twenties.

A better marriage meant more passionate sex, this went without saying. But by now I noticed a pattern: improving my marriage in one area often caused problems in another. More intimacy meant less autonomy. More passion meant less stability. Better sex actually made me retreat. There’s a school of thought that views sex as a metaphor for marriage.

Its proponents write rational-minded books like Patricia Love and Jo Robinson’s Hot Monogamy, in which they argue, ‘When couples share their thoughts and emotions freely throughout the day, they create between them a high degree of trust and emotional connection, which gives them the freedom to explore their sexuality more fully.’

But there’s an opposing school: sex – even sex in marriage – requires barriers and uncertainty, and we are fools to imagine otherwise. ‘Romantic love, at the start of this century, is cause for embarrassment,’ Cristina Nehring moans in A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. She berates the conventional marital set-up: two spouses, one house, one bedroom.

Still, I agreed with Nehring’s argument that we need ‘to rediscover the right to impose distances, the right to remain strangers’. Could my postcoital flitting away be a means to re-establish erotic distance? An appealing thought, but not the whole truth. My relationship with Dan started on rocky footing. When we met he was working through the aftershocks of an affair with an emotionally sadistic, sexually self-aggrandising woman.

She said hurtful things to him, he said hurtful things to me (‘Why do you kiss like that?’). Not a perfect foundation for a marriage. Nor was the fact that Dan spent the early years of ours writing an erotic Bildungsroman about this ex, including references to everyone he’d ever slept with. I never quite shook the feeling that my role in Dan’s life was to be the steady, vanilla lay.

Now, in the office of our sexual therapist, Betsy Kassoff, our issues came pouring out. Dan began with an exhaustive history. I can’t tell you how monumentally sick I felt hearing about Dan’s ex-girlfriends. Betsy worked gently and efficiently, a nurse undressing a wound. I said that I felt hemmed in by what I believed was my duty to be ‘regular’, and annoyed that, in the context of our marriage, Dan supposedly had an important sexual history while I had none.

Dan then admitted his fantasies about my past lovers, his fear that they had accessed parts of me that were walled off from him. After revealing all this in 50 minutes we both felt wrung out and dazed. How, 10 years into our marriage and nine months into improving it, could our sex life still be under the thumbs of exes we no longer talked to or desired?

What is a good marriage? How good is good enough? Ultimately, each philosophy of what makes a good marriage felt like a four-fingered glove. Maybe the perversity we all feel in the idea of striving at marriage – the reason so few of us do it – stems from a misapprehension of the proper goal.

In the early years we take our marriages to be vehicles for wish fulfilment; we get the mate, maybe a house, an end to loneliness, some kids. But to keep expecting our marriages to fulfil our desires – to bring us the unending happiness or passion or intimacy or stability we crave – and to measure our unions by their capacity to satisfy those longings, is naive. I didn’t want the conventional, perfect-looking marriage.

I wanted our marriage – our exasperating, idiosyncratic marriage. I had a good marriage before I spent a year improving it, and I have a good marriage now. In fact, my marriage is better, truly. Although not in the ways I’d expected.

No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better (Scribner), by Elizabeth Weil, is available from amazon.co.uk